Derrotero

Created and performed by Gabriela Burdsall & William Ruiz Morales

Duration: 30 min

“Derrotero” is a choreographed performance project created and performed by Gabriela Burdsall and William Ruiz Morales with the collaboration of composer Nina Fukuoka and architect Daniela Friedman.

An ephemeral monumental machine

“Derrotero” is a machine dedicated to activating and celebrating personal myths and memories connected to forms of resilience, work, failure, and inventiveness that are common resources of Caribbean subjects. “Derrotero” is a “poetic monument” :

(…) “some monuments of totalitarian regimes and democratic regimes alike fail in allowing the world to be open to us. In Heidegger’s terms, they fail to be poetic. In other words, monuments that resist interpretation and instead present an ideological perspective close off our ability to be mindful and to be reminded in a way that is conducive to active and open public discussion of their role and purpose in our social and political life. Monuments, precisely because they have such great potential to organize public space, because they invoke our past and inspire us to address our future, can be extremely important in public discourse.”

Janet Donohoe, “Dwelling with monuments”

“Derrotero” is poetical in the sense that it assembles a variety of materials to produce new associations and emotions. It pays tribute to found objects and the act of scavenging for them. Poetry emerges in the tension and movements of those objects in dialogue with the human presence, a relation of feedback and respect.

About the process

“Derrotero” is a performance based on immanent fragments. Discrete impressions that we find along the way. We reacted to our environment, collecting elements that became the performance piece. Inventiveness, improvisation, and instability are some of the characteristics of our work. We find those characteristics to be familiar to Caribbean subjects. Our history of failure has made us ready to rebuild in any circumstance as a matter of survival. That readiness intensifies by our immigrant condition, a process that constantly challenges us to negotiate between our native culture and the one we are inserting ourselves. Our work develops convivial places to exchange sensations and ideas about those crossings.